Technology overview

Cancer is expected to become the most common cause of death in Western societies in the near future. The treatment of cancer ranges from surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, monoclonal antibody therapy or other methods. Currently, a number of other cancer treatments is under development.

One of the novel treatments is therapeutic vaccination. An ideal therapeutic cancer vaccine induces strong anti-tumor responses while sparing healthy tissues. This strongly depends on the induction of immunological responses against dominant and subdominant epitopes as well as the induction of co-stimulatory signals.

Therapeutic vaccine technology can be differentiated by mode of antigen presentation, e.g. ISA's SLP®, vector delivery, recombinant proteins, and short peptides. ISA's SLP® concept, is based on the use of Synthetic Long Peptides for vaccination. Compared to other vaccine technologies, SLP®-vaccination has a higher likelihood to have a therapeutic effect because it is achieved through the induction of effective CD8+ T-cell and CD4+ T cell responses and co-stimulatory signals as well as induction of strong responses against subdominant epitopes independent of HLA type. Furthermore, because of its mode of action, SLP®-vaccination is expected to have a very beneficial safety profile.